Another huge game is set to hit Macs soon. CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition, which comes with the Phantom Liberty DLC, will be the latest AAA title to be playable on Apple Silicon.
CD Projekt Red didn’t have a lot of information to share, but it’s targeting a 2025 release and will support features like path tracing, which offers a similar effect as ray tracing, frame generation for increased frame rates, and built-in spatial audio. It’ll be available on the Mac App Store and Steam. If you own a copy of the game for PC on Steam, it’ll carry over to your Mac. The studio will have more details at a later date.
MacOS hasn’t always been known as a great system for playing video games. While there are some excellent games you can play on Mac, many of them don’t require powerful hardware to run. Apple has been working to fix that over the past few years, with technology like MetalFX upscaling that can boost gaming performance without requiring a discrete GPU.
With M3 and M4 Apple Silicon, Mac gaming has been taken to new levels. Apple has been touting this prowess with AAA releases like Resident Evil Village, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and Death Stranding: Director’s Cut. Mac has also gotten newer releases like Lies of P and Baldur’s Gate 3.
The question is if anybody will want to play these games on Mac to begin with. Apple still has a long way to go in that regard, and it definitely needs more games to do it. But for CD Projekt Red, it just gets Cyberpunk 2077 on a new platform. It’s already on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC, but it was also on Google Stadia (RIP) at launch. After Mac, the only platform missing is the Nintendo Switch, although that release would be extremely unlikely.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.